“Migration to a standard protocol running on a well-defined medium such as Gigabit Ethernet, Serial RapidI/O, or Aurora allows IP cores to be developed that can be easily supported for the long term,” commented Joseph Primeau, Acromag’s embedded sales and marketing director.

Build options include the choice of a Xilinx XC7K325T or XC7K410T FPGA device. Acromag’s XMC-7K family offers highly efficient and dependable boards. Options include plug-in I/O, dual SFP+ ports, or conduction-cooled for extended temperature. An engineering design kit provides user with basic information required to develop a custom FPGA program. Software support packages are available for VxWorks® 32-bit, Windows® DLL, and Linux™.

About Acromag

Acromag has designed and manufactured measurement and control products for more than 50 years. They are an international corporation with a world headquarters near Detroit, Michigan and a global network of sales representatives and distributors. Acromag offers a complete line of embedded I/O products including bus boards, mezzanine modules, embedded computers, wiring accessories, and software. Industries served include military, aerospace, manufacturing, transportation, utilities, and scientific research laboratories.

Systems with high speed serial links often have serial channels which result in signal distortion described as insertion loss, reflection, cross-talk, and other channel impairments. Receiver equalization can help compensate for such channel-driven losses and distortions, but link tuning and bring-up can be non-trivial even for the most experienced transceiver and signal integrity specialists. In this video, you'll learn how Xilinx FPGAs with fully auto-adaptive equalization is critical to high speed transceiver design and enables system designers to get their systems up and running quickly.

At DESIGN West 2012 (aka "ESC" San Jose), Senior Editor Chris A. Ciufo sat down with TI's Matt Kurtz, Manager, Wireless Connectivity Group. Matt's group's job is to add wireless capabilities to microcontrollers with "everything from ANT to ZigBee". Consider their SimpleLink initiative, which is comprised of chipsets, protocols, APIs and drivers that make easy the task of adding wireless to a TI microcontroller product. In this short video, Matt explains that TI's focus is one-stop-shopping and simplicity. Judging from market feedback, TI has met its goals.

The economic downturn has had an upside for some industry segments. PCB prototyping service Screaming Circuits has seen business climb steadily since it’s founding in 2003 as more companies have cut back staff and resources, stretching engineering staffs beyond their own capabilities. Screaming Circuits recently formed a relationship with Newark/element14 to offer their services to the element14 community. In this interview with Duane Benson, director of marketing and sales, Benson elaborates on the growing prototyping market in the PCB industry as well as the challenges and needs of their customer base.